Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
The Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast, hosted by Philip P. Arnold and Sandy Bigtree (Mohawk Nation), critically examines the historical and ongoing impacts of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Rooted in 15th-century papal edicts, this doctrine provided theological and legal justification for European colonialism, the seizure of Indigenous lands, and the subjugation of non-Christian peoples. The podcast explores how these principles became codified in U.S. law, from Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) to Sherrill v. Oneida (2005), and continue to underpin contemporary legal, religious, and corporate frameworks. Featuring discussions with scholars, legal experts, and Indigenous leaders, the series sheds light on how this doctrine fuels environmental destruction, economic exploitation, and cultural genocide while also highlighting Indigenous resistance and calls for justice, land restoration, and the repudiation of these colonial structures. https://podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org/
Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
Defending Mother Earth from The Doctrine of Christian Discovery #NoKings
Standing on the shores of Onondaga Lake—the birthplace of democracy in North America—Haudenosaunee knowledge keepers share timeless wisdom about our relationship with Mother Earth. This powerful conversation begins with Jake Edwards reciting the Thanksgiving Address, a profound expression of gratitude that acknowledges the interconnected responsibilities of all beings.
"When you look at the responsibilities that were given to us with the original instructions of humans," Edwards explains, "the details of environmental justice are all in there." The Onondaga Nation has maintained these teachings despite centuries of attempted erasure, and they offer crucial insights for our current environmental crisis.
Faithkeeper Oren Lyons reminds us that the Great Tree of Peace—a thousand-year-old teaching symbolized in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Belt—represents the foundation of true democracy, one that extends rights and consideration to all living beings, not just humans. "World peace is the only solution," he states, warning that climate change is accelerating while leaders focus on war instead of survival.
The conversation unfolds against the backdrop of colonial history, as participants explore how the Doctrine of Christian Discovery created legal frameworks that justified land theft and attempted to sever indigenous peoples from their connection to the earth. Now, ironically, many institutions built on these foundations are looking to indigenous knowledge for environmental healing, often without addressing their complicity in displacement.
Most powerfully, the speakers offer clear direction for moving forward: "If you want to start healing," Edwards states, "you start with where it started—taking the land. So give it back." He draws direct connections between environmental restoration projects like dam removal on the Klamath River and the return of land to indigenous stewardship.
Listen to this essential conversation about gratitude, responsibility, and what it truly means to live in right relationship with the earth and each other. Share these teachings widely—our collective future may depend on it.
View the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org. Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.
Hello and welcome to the Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast. The producers of this podcast would like to acknowledge with respect the Onondaga Nation firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee, the indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University now stands.
Speaker 3:Anytime we gather, we put our minds together, kindly and respectfully, as one, and give a great gratitude to all the people who are able to be here. And so we let it be that way in our minds. And then we direct our thoughts as one again to our Mother, the Earth, who's carrying on her responsibilities, the great responsibilities to provide for us as we walk about in peace and contentment. And so we kindly and respectfully put our minds together as one and give a great gratitude to our mother, who's still carrying on her original instructions to provide for us. And so we let it be that way in our minds and we direct our thoughts to the plant life, the medicines that were put here, and we encourage everybody's mind to be as one with gratitude that the medicines and the plants and the berries. When I say that, I cut it short, some speakers can do the kanohenyo, the Thanksgiving address, for 45 minutes to an hour, sometimes longer, without translation, and so what they'll incorporate is the small details of the responsibilities that each that is spoken of has, that was given in their original instructions, and the birds, the seeds, the plant life, the roots and their connection to the earth, to our mother earth, as we have that same connection and the waters that's needed. And sometimes the speakers will go on to the songs that the birds sing and the words that they speak that bring peace to us when we listen to them. And when we listen to them it's not just yeah, I heard the birds this morning, I listened to them this morning, to what they have to say for this day. They know already, they're up early and they know already, and so they also have the responsibility of moving seeds around from different berry bushes you got blackberry bushes so that we can all enjoy it and their songs and their words and their stories that they have and their journeys they can see, like the eagle sees, and we get into that about the leaders of all the animals. The leaders of the fruits and the berries is the strawberry is the leader of them, and the leaders of the food sources is the three sisters, the corns, the beans in the squash are the leaders of the food sustenances.
Speaker 3:The animals the four-legged is the deer, and I get into the Thanksgiving of all their responsibilities that we know that are still carrying on is in fine detail, and so when we cut cross lights, we just, we just mention the deer as the leader or the strawberry as the leader.
Speaker 3:We don't get into the ceremonial aspects of it, as some speakers will at certain times, and so when you go in, the leader of the winged animals is the eagle and you get into the description of what the eagle's vision is and how he was placed on top of the great tree of peace and how the great tree of peace is and the winds that come, the winds that are circulating throughout, that give us breath, fresh, pure air. To breathe also strengthens the roots of the forest, which strengthens our bond with the forest, to our mother, the earth, and so, cutting it short, you lose a lot, you miss out on a lot. So anything that is left out and anything that you can add to it, keep it in your own mind and in your own heart to have gratitude for, in your own mind and in your own heart, to have gratitude for in your own way.
Speaker 3:And so then, we carry on to the Thunder Beings, the Thunder Beings who come from the West, and they and we know that they can carry a powerful, they have a great strength, they have strength enough to uproot trees, and we're reminded of that, that we have no control of the elements and the duties that they have, although we can always show our gratitude that they're carrying the waters when they bring the waters, and to bring gentle winds when they come through.
Speaker 3:We ask them that to be gentle, because we know their strength can be powerful. And so we kindly and respectfully put our minds together as one and give a great gratitude to all the things that was planted and all the things that was put down here for us, so that we, in our turn to walk about on Mother Earth, can be in peace and contentment. And so we'll let it be that way in our minds, and we direct our thoughts to the son, our elder brother, the son who carries on each and every day, without fail his responsibility to help warm the Earth, to warm our bodies, warm our Mother Earth, so that she can carry on her duties too, in the balance of providing for us. And as she provides for us. We provide gratitude back each and every day, as well as the responsibilities of the son, each and every day, without fail. And so it's a reminder to us to have that gratitude without fail, each and every day for what's put here for us. And then we direct our thoughts to our Grandmother Moon, who carries the great responsibility, and she has the authority or the original instruction, to provide the way the currents flow, the way the water flows here on Mother Earth. She watches over Mother Earth, as a grandmother would, and she also has the great responsibility of the flow of water that each and every one was in for nine months before we even took a breath, and so she's in control of the future generations to come. The face is yet to come.
Speaker 3:The future is in the responsibility of our grandmother, the moon, who still carries on that responsibility.
Speaker 3:So, in working with the stars all the many, many stars that are there to guide us at night, to guide us and direct us into certain times of the years, of our ceremonies and certain times, destinations that we travel, they can guide us in the direction in the proper way. And so we kindly and respectfully bundle all that gratitude together of one mind and share it with all the Sky Beans who are carrying on their work. And we direct our thoughts now to a message that we received from Skanya Dayo Skanya Dayo, handsome Lake he's called in English and he was a messenger that these new, different ways of people's lives will be coming into our house and that they're coming in in great numbers and they're coming in to stay, and so that is telling us how that we can live with them and keep our own ways, in which we do, but to include them in our thoughts because they're in our house, and so we kindly, respectfully and there's many, there's what? Four, six days of that message. So, to just put it in that we give thanksgiving to Skunyatayo it's.
Speaker 3:But to just put it in that we give thanksgiving to Skunyatayo, it's almost like putting a dot over an eye of the whole book, because there's so much in that message. There's prophecies in there that we've seen, which I'm sure Oren has seen, many more than I have, and prophecies that come true. And so there's prophecies, there's warnings and there's encouragements to live in peace and harmony. And the main part for us to live in peace and harmony is to carry on who we are, with the gratitude that was given to us with the original instructions and that we do was given to us with the original instructions and that we do. And so we give great gratitude for a reminder of that message to carry on the gratitude. So we let it be that way in our minds. Then we direct our thoughts to Creator, creator, who has put down here and planted all of what we need to be at peace and contentment, and so he set down here a way to share the love that he had put in to us as beings, so that we can be at peace amongst ourselves to share with others. And so that is still in our minds, still going on on a smaller scale than we all would hope for, but it's still going on amongst us, and so, therefore, we share great gratitude that it was gifted to us in that way, and so we let it be that way in our minds. And so that's a short translation of Kanohenyo Thanksgiving address. It's not a prayer. We're not pleading for anything. The only part in there that we acknowledge some sort of that direction would be with the winds to be gentle as they come through our villages, because we know their strength. And so we carry this on.
Speaker 3:Whether the meetings are small, gatherings are small or large, whether it's a clan meeting, council meeting, ceremonial, and, like I said, some speakers will take you right into it, wrap you right in as one with their words and find detail of all the responsibilities. And so when you look at the responsibilities that was given to us with the original instructions of humans, the details of environmental justice are in there, they're all in there. It talks about the balance, the balance Oren mentioned. Sometimes he's told us about the wolves being put back into the Yellowstone and what they did for the whole forest. That's all in there too. If you want to look at it that way, you do get these people that do research as you find the small print they call it. So when you look at the Kano Hanyu and our instructions to our Mother Earth and to our beings plant labiens, animal beings, to all our beings it's in there if you go, do the research and study and pay attention.
Speaker 3:And so when you talk about environmental justice, it begins with gratitude and so to share that gratitude it's we hear before what Orrin mentioned. I like to quote Orrin because he's got such sharp quotes, got such sharp quotes. He talks about his young age and how many people are populating the Earth. And he talks about today and how many people 8 billion people, something like that and he says how do you instruct 8 billion people to their responsibility to Mother Earth, eight billion people to their responsibility to Mother Earth? And that still question is still to be answered. But when I heard the question I thought it's in our teachings, it's already in there, it's in the Thanksgiving address. It talks about the children's faces yet to come and our responsibility to look out for them. It talks about the decisions you make are of gratitude and so we're always constantly reminded of the decisions that you make today as individuals, as a council, as a community, are to no way negatively affect seven generations coming. So the instructions are in there. The answer is in there. It's just how do you get it out to eight billion people? And to this day, this day's how this world works is around the dollar sign.
Speaker 3:And the ones with no money are seldom listened to, seldom heard. That's why you got so many homeless people here, them homeless people. If you listen to them, they're more close to the earth than the one who gets off their pavement into their rubber-tired car and going into their houses. Never touch the earth. Go in a building, apartment, building, elevator they never touch the earth. But they're the ones who want you to listen to them. They have no real connection to the Mother Earth. Now, if you go to these homeless people and the poor people, the ones with their hands in the dirt, they know that feeling. They have that connection as well as the forest. They're the ones who feel it.
Speaker 3:You talk to the indigenous communities and populations anywhere in the world. Those are the ones you'll get the answers from. They're the ones who are barefoot on earth, their hands are in the soil, they're the closest to their mother, yet to survive and share gratitude. So they don't listen to the newscast, they don't listen to Wall Street and the Dow Jones, and all of that because it doesn't affect what responsibility they have today to provide for their future generations. So when you look at the dam like that big dam they just took up in Klamath River, and you see the reports of how it's recovered, because those fish were able to swim over that rock that their ancestors fish used to swim under and over and later eggs.
Speaker 3:So when you follow nature's original instructions, like we do the best that we can, that's what's going to make this world survive and for future generations to come. And so when you turn close the curtain just a little bit and start drilling over here and pumping oil across the river upstream, just because you can't see it, that doesn't mean it's not going to cause damage, because they're not made forever, like everything else, temporary. We're only here for a short time and our responsibilities are to look out and make sure that what we do here, that what we leave when we're done here, is better or just as how you found it when you were here, for future generations. It's each and every one of our responsibilities and that's in our teachings, and so that's the short version of the opening and it's just another short reminder that our teachings have. We're survivors.
Speaker 3:We're going through it again today, just putting it back in survival mode with the attacks on all our surroundings. And so you know, if we can survive genocide a couple times in our history, then we can probably survive another genocide. That's the attempts that are coming on us, which are, from what I understand, the financials. In today's day and age, we're not living off the earth as well as we should be and conducting our own food source as individual homesteaders, individual nations and communities. So it's a reminder to us whoever's in charge of your food source is basically in charge of you and your survival. That has to change back to our own responsibilities as individuals, as families, as a clan, as a family, as a nation. It has to go back that way. It has to start with the family.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I thought it was important for you to hear our perspective. You're in our perspective, you're in our country and combine that, combine your mission and understand that when you come into Indian country, right across the country, they have very much the same what you just heard. We know all about life relationship and, as you can see, it's a responsibility. As you know, you carry responsibility, and so we maintain this in our longhouse. We are not Christians, but this is what we follow and this is what you will find almost right across the country.
Speaker 4:The Christian doctrine that was come over here on the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria, yeah, left a hard mark on us, a hard mark, and we're, as he said, we're survivors.
Speaker 4:We're still here and we still keep that word. Our longhouse ceremonies are long and they follow basically what our opening words are, and we're instructed that we start every meeting with those words, big or small, you know and start that and since you're in the spirituality business, you should have some comprehension of what we think about that and how we understand that. And so we have, as you heard, we have a responsibility for future generations. We have to maintain what we have as good as we can, so that those faces that are looking up from the earth in each layer waiting its time that they have what we have today. That's a responsibility and a lot of people today imagine A lot of people today we survived Pretty close, got wiped out almost, but we survived that first, and now we see that the situation in the world today is very tenuous. We have changed the system that we live in Over a long period of time. We've changed that system, we've affected it and you can't fix it.
Speaker 4:It's beyond your fixing. You've changed it and the change is not good and we're beginning to see that. Now we talk, as you heard, seven generations, and those generations are the full lifetime, not that short cut. Twenty years you talk about, that's childhood. Twenty years, so the full generation, seven times. That's what we're looking at and we remind our people to have that long vision to protect those coming generations and all the life. And he went through. We're not just responsible to human beings, we're responsible to all life. We went through that litany, all the fish, all the animals, everything, right down to the grass. We're responsible. In my lifetime you know I'm pretty old now I've seen a lot of changes, really amazing changes.
Speaker 4:I grew up in a horse and buggy. Yeah, 1930's, a long time ago, it was just changing. At that time Cars were just coming. There was one car on the Daga territory and everybody walked, everybody planted. When we went to the store we bought bulk stuff. The stores not look what you see today. Back there in the day there were bushels and you bought things in bulk and then you went back and you made your food with it. It lasts a long time that way.
Speaker 4:It's quite different today, and so I thought that, since you are in the business of spirituality, so to speak, you should have Native people and understand that. We've been here a long time, a long time, and we have instructions. When we have these big gatherings of Native people around the country, they always ask an elder, or something like how Jake spoke, to open the meeting, and whoever speaks speaks in their language, and if it's Lakota or Cheyenne or Nez Perce, many, many languages here, it doesn't matter, because we know what they're saying, because it's always the same. So one man can stand or one woman can stand and speak for everybody, because our minds are the same, and that goes to Central America and South America. I understand that, and so, in your mission, you're young people and you're traveling.
Speaker 4:Now you're learning, and one of the major instructions that we receive, number one instruction is respect, respect for yourself and respect for whoever you're speaking to, and respect for the earth and respect for everything. That's a law. That's a law, that's a law, and if you carry that law, life is good, life is good. So respect, and then the other one that we have is sharing. We share, share everything equally. So when your ideas of capitalism came over here and hooray for me and to hell with everybody. Not a good idea as far as we're concerned. It might be a good idea for the individual who has all the money now, but what about the rest? What about the rest of the people?
Speaker 4:So you are in a mission and you're going to be traveling, and so I thought it would be helpful for you to have some idea of some of the people you're going to be talking to and understand that they know everything that you're just heard, probably more, and so the mission, your mission is—well, I don't know if I were to be in your shoes, how I would approach that, you know, but I just wanted you to have some comprehension of the Native people of this country and probably pretty much around the world, because when we meet with other Native people in Europe and so forth, pretty much the same and pretty much the same with all people, not just Native people, everybody. Life is the same, you know. Nothing is different, you know. I think it's important to enlarge your perspective in that direction. It will help you, when you come to other nations, to understand that there's elders sitting there that know a lot, and we've always been taught to be respectful respectful to the speaker, so when someone in our confederation is standing, no one interrupts them.
Speaker 4:So we stand when we speak and they listen, and so I think this meeting here is what I'm sharing, and it would be interesting to me and some of our people here to hear some of your thoughts and what your mission is, that's do. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So I'd like to welcome everyone to the Scano Center. My name's Phil Arnold I think I know everyone anyway and I was the founding director of the Scano Center. I wanted to just take a minute at the beginning or kind of one of the beginnings of this event to acknowledge the life and work of Sally Rocheway. She it's maybe not too much to say that we wouldn't have been able to create the center, and this is exactly what we wanted to create the center to do is to have indigenous and settler colonial people put it that way coming together and trying to work out maybe a possible future. So we're looking at the past but we're looking at the future, and that was really a kind of spirit of Sally's work that I hope we can continue.
Speaker 5:She had just finished a manuscript called Survival is Indigenous that I don't know the status of right now, but I would love to see it published. I she was also working on another one. She was working on at least three to two or three books. So that's where my mind goes, because part of what we're doing here and many of you already know this is trying to carry the work further in terms of more research, more writing and generate more resources that we can use in the class or classroom. Resources that we can use in the class or classroom. So we're here to talk about the doctrine of Christian discovery, the Jesuits and Laudato Si, and we have experts in the room on many of these topics, but the whole context of this is defending Mother Earth. That's the subtitle of the panel here.
Speaker 5:You know the work on the doctrine of discovery I feel has been going on for a long time, but in many ways it's just kind of beginning, because the more we're looking at archival work in old texts and documents, the more we tend to know and appreciate, if I can put it this way and I don't want to offend anyone but how Christianity was built. So we're meeting to get today, this sparse crowd because of the no about democratic principles have eroded. For myself, for our family, this is not very surprising. This is not very surprising because what we've always felt is that we need to investigate the origins of these pernicious problems, which go back millennia. It didn't happen the day before yesterday, it didn't happen in the 24 election, it happened millennia ago. So, you know, academics are continuously looking at the origins of Christianity, the origins, and it was frankly built and created to support kings, to justify the divine right of kings Caesars, if you like, even at the very beginning.
Speaker 5:So when we think about the origins of the doctrine of Christian discovery, where they literally come in with the documents that say if Christians enter the lands of non-Christian people, those lands, their bodies and all their worldly possessions automatically are deeded to the sponsoring king, the pope, etc. Those legal formulations in the 15th century didn't come out of nowhere either, right, they go back. Now. You know there is and, as I said, there's continual conversations about this among academics. There's continual conversations about this among academics, biblical studies people and other historians, medieval historians and others who are trying to reinterpret many of these texts that have been looked and worked over many times. So you know, the colonial, the colonists, came in with the idea of empire, with the idea of divine kingship.
Speaker 5:I want to personalize this a little bit, because Sandy and I have been traveling all over the world doing genealogical work, and this is something that actually Jake has put me onto way back many decades ago, because he said how is it that you come to be here? How is it that we all come to be here? What is our story? What's our legacy?
Speaker 5:It ends up that I had six ancestors on the Mayflower, one of which was William Bradford, and if you know anything about the pilgrims he was a big deal. I've got a cousin here in the back here.
Speaker 5:So we've been around for over 400 years in this territory I could go on, but I'm not going to and the things you discover are amazing. But after 400 years, does that mean we're indigenous? No, absolutely not. So what are we talking about here? It's not about being in a place for a long time. It's about having and inhabiting a kind of worldview, right?
Speaker 5:So you know, what we're giving today by Jake and Oren and the Onondaga Nation is a world view that is at odds with the world that was created by the doctrine of Christian discovery. And we're just inhabiting kind of the late, you know the later, period of what is the logical conclusion of colonialism, right? So the doctrine of discovery is not something that is just old, it's kind of precise in a way. In a way it's very precise historically. We can look at it, we can study it, but then it also is everywhere. And Donald Trump is probably the logical conclusion of the doctrine of discovery. It's not a surprise, the logical conclusion of the doctrine of discovery. It's not a surprise.
Speaker 5:And the democratic principles that we hear ringing in people's, you know, speeches and everything have to include the natural world, have to. The democratic principles of the Haudenosaunee that came out of this lake, that inspired the founding fathers and the founding mothers of the women's movement, was not just for human beings, it was for all beings. So what the founding fathers took up as their mantle for democracy was just like a small bit of what the Haudenosaunee were constantly trying to communicate from 1613 all the way to the present. So what's ironic? I'll give you an example of what we're talking about. What we're doing is that the Jesuits were here, only a few steps from here. They built a fort, they came in 1656, and they were forced out in 1658. It was a failed mission, and yet that has been celebrated in Syracuse. It's really just a minor blip on the historical screen, and yet that has been celebrated over and over and for over 100 years here. So, the.
Speaker 1:Jesuits were here.
Speaker 5:What did they come to do? They came to convert, and that meant forcibly get the Onondagas to submit to the King of France and the Pope. They wanted to create another kind of peasant class in the Americas.
Speaker 5:They came with a deed for 600 square miles to Onondaga Lake when they arrived and the irony is, all through the 17th century, the Jesuits in the Jesuit relations are describing the Haudenosaunee and other native groups that they encounter, and they're saying things like the women have have feel like they have control of their own bodies, okay, as if it were outrageous. Okay they're saying things like you know, the men listen to the women. Can you imagine that? Saying things like you know, the men listen to the women. Can you imagine that?
Speaker 5:And that's where we discover you know, that the ideas and all the principles of the Haudenosaunee and other native confederacies are making inroads into the minds of Europeans. And it's through this kind of negative analysis, almost like looking through a negative right, that you can see that. And we have a Fulbright scholar here who can't make it today, but she's gone through all 74 volumes of the Jesuit relations over the last six months and has kind of unpacked all of these kind of aha moments of the Jesuits and what that leads to is that the French, for example, start to get the idea oh, maybe freedom isn't just submitting to a monarch or submitting to a priest or a pope. You have kind of the origins of not only democracy but the enlightenment that are embedded in those Jesuit relations, but always in the kind of a strange kind of flip side way. Just another book called the Dawn of Everything that came out probably five years ago actually talks about how Native people developed whole philosophical systems, how they developed scientific analysis and the women's liberation movement in Europe Out of this lake.
Speaker 5:Out of this lake. So you know the script is being flipped, but it's, and that's maybe the good news, but the bad news is that we need to continually look to foundational issues, I think, and Doctrine of Discovery in the Jesuits, and you know, Laudato Si, I was looking at Christi in that context you know, this idea that the church now wants to approach the whole issue of environmental healing.
Speaker 5:I want to just say something else too, because then I'm going to have Jake take it. But the Jesuits were here and they describe their time here, which was about 18 months, and that's also in the Jesuit relations. But as early I mean going back at least 150 years ago or more there's another story, the Onondaga, of that encounter, and so you have the text of the Jesuit relations that recounts that story.
Speaker 5:but we also have a wampum belt that recounts this story. This is a copy of a wampum belt that I think is Six Nations maybe, and I've heard Oren tell this story before, but it's a story. It's an old story that I've read in other documents, at the Anadar's Oracle Association, for example. But this is the belt that recounts a very different perspective on what the Jesuits were trying to do and so by comparing the Jesuit relations with the wampum belt, you can kind of arrive at another version of what actually happened.
Speaker 5:And we know something intensely negative happened between the Onondaga and the Jesuits, because there has not been a Catholic church on Onondaga Nation territory ever, right. So it was a failed mission in so many ways, right. But you know, in this work, in this doctrine of discovery work, we reach out to everybody, because there are many Christians who are trying to repair this history and even their own tradition, right, Even their own religious tradition in many ways. So this is the kind of work that I'm really devoted to and I'm glad that we're able to have this meeting today.
Speaker 4:Okay, I just wanted to, jake, just hold this up. This is our Confederacy Belt of Union. Starting from the east is the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas and the Senecas, and later came the Tascaroras, made of six, but this is the original. And in the center here of Onondaga is the Great Tree of Peace. And if you look at the or listen to the history, they talk about the fierce Iroquois, the killers. They cause a lot of names, you know, but in reality this is who we are peace. We tried and we tried and we tried to maintain that. And during the 400 years the Haudenosaunee were prominent there. They said we had at least 85 nations under our wing and our influences all the way down to Mississippi, down to Georgia, across and up that section. But that was our influence. We didn't control or we didn't rule, we supported the people in there. But in the center is the great tree of peace and that's the foundation of our confederation peace, equity for the people and union. The strength of the five nations come together, great union based on peace. And now today it's starting to come back around.
Speaker 4:Now, people like yourself sitting here talking about this business Because it's important, as you know, world peace is the only solution there is to what's going on, nothing else. And that's our mission, been our mission all this time. So we really, you know, welcome you here for this opportunity to exchange some of our thoughts, and so you understand. But the missionaries that you sent over here, well, they were over here early, long, long ago. They were like a spearhead. They came in and everything else followed them in, and we were almost eliminated. They were almost—but we survived. So we're still here and the issue is still here, and this belt is really still here, and it should be in the minds of all human beings. World peace is the only solution, nothing else. And so I'm glad that you brought the belt. But we have many belts like this. This is a thousand years old, this idea, at least a thousand. It could be two, we don't know.
Speaker 4:But foundational thinking, and of course, the principle is always spiritual unity, spiritual law prevails all the time, every time, everywhere, every day. You are not going to change that. That's the law, that's nature, that's nature, and the only thing that can happen, you know, is that we eliminate ourselves. You know, human beings are like fleas on the dog. Do all our little wiggling here, but the dog is pretty big, and so that's where we have to be careful. We don't want him to shake, so that's where we have to be careful, we don't want him to shake. So that's where we are and I think your mission, or your travels, broaden your experience and get perspectives and understand that the indigenous people of the western hemisphere are very old, very, very old, with a lot of perspective, and I think that if the white people never came over here and we were always here we would.
Speaker 4:But anyway, that's just some of my thoughts, so I'd like to hear some response or perspective from you.
Speaker 7:Hi everybody, Thank you for coming on this strange but precedented day in long history and thank you to the Onondaga Nation for having us here and for you amazing, generous hosts and knowledge keepers for welcoming us in, because my settler colonial Jesuit academic ilk have not always been good to the traditions and knowledge of those who've come long before. So thank you. It's an honor and I'm humbled and it feels like a privilege. So I would prefer to sit and listen to many others all day, many others all day. But this work that began as my own professional work in many ways has also in the last six months taken root with Kim Carfor, who's here from University of San Francisco and who does amazing work that she'll tell us about, and then expanding to Phil and Sandy, whose incredible work here, and also connecting with settler colonial university institutions.
Speaker 7:Phil, your book, the Urgency of Indigenous Values, is one that I teach at Fordham with my students, and Chip Callahan, who's here from Gonzaga, has been a conversation partner and we've been working on a project on religion in extractive zones and how that has looked historically and how that continues looking in the present mode. But my name is I forgot that Details. Okay, so my name is Christiana or Christy Zenner. I am coming to you most approximately from the New York area. I teach at Fordham University, which is on Lenape lands.
Speaker 7:At Fordham University, which is on Lenape lands, in an area of which many of us know the history in shorter spans and one of the streams that brought me to this work, this, what is my mission or what is the story of how on earth did I get here is through Waters. And as someone who was born in the west of this country and grew up in the states known as California and Colorado in the current geopolitical formation, I was very attuned to Waters' absences and how valued it was economically and politically and contested and fast-forwarding a lot of years. I realized that among my academic passions and teaching passions and learning passions was this question of what sort of thing is water and who gets to decide and what are the values that should guide and do guide different kinds of societies in different places, so that we can learn better about how to be in relation with one another and the waters that flow. And so, anyway, I won't get into all the academic details, but I ended up getting hired at Fordham.
Speaker 1:So I did my.
Speaker 7:PhD in religious studies. There was one chapter in that dissertation which was on valuing water. The one chapter in the dissertation was on Catholic social teaching and the way that what I saw then this is like 2008, 9, 10, I graduated in 2011 with my PhD the way that I saw that the Catholic Church was, somewhat surprisingly to me, turning to questions of ecology Not yet I wrote down what you said, phil environmental healing. I don't know that the church is about that yet, but we'll see. And so I wrote this one chapter and I said you know, it's interesting. I think there's this turn towards ecology going on in Catholic social teaching, and water seems to be something that the Pope, at least, is concerned about. Okay, so I published a book about that in order to get tenure. So there's pragmatism in my story too. And then Pope Francis was elected in 2013. And he signaled very early on that he wanted to be attuned to creation and to poverty.
Speaker 7:2015,. He writes this document. It's called an encyclical, it's in the form of a letter. It's very authoritative status as texts go in a text-obsessed tradition like Catholicism, and it was about ecology understood as relations between, which are, of course, in Catholicism, hierarchical between God and humans, and then humans in each other and humans in the natural world, and because I was in a theology, science and ethics position at a Jesuit university and had written this book that explained some of these trajectories of the Catholic Church's turn to ecology, I was swept up into this interpretation of Laudato Si. Being part of that has been really interesting Not easy.
Speaker 7:It's a curious thing to be in a Jesuit theology department and to be seen as a feminist theologian who represents the tradition, when I don't represent the tradition and I don't understand myself as a theologian, but I do understand myself as a feminist and to try to walk that line of what is the good that may be said here and what are the histories we have to take account of and the problematic frameworks that are being put forward in this document, and how do we talk about those as scholars and powerful white settler people in the world who go to Davos and make policy decisions and all of that. So there have been a couple of really big worries that I have about that document and the way that it participates in and reveals a lot about Catholic thought and these won't come as surprises to certainly not to my esteemed elders at this table, but probably not to anyone here either and that's the question of Christian triumphalism and histories of settler, colonialism and domination, related questions of hierarchies of gender male over female but also hierarchies between spirit and matter, hierarchies between knowledge systems and ways of knowing Western so-called over indigenous. And then has become abundantly clear this turn to indigenous values that Pope Francis wrote about in Laudato Si. So he, bill McKibben, climate activist, wrote in 2015 in the New York Review of Books the Pope's turn to indigenous values is quite remarkable, coming, you know, given that this is an institution that have first set out to colonize the world. So everything, everything depends on the heart in which that is written and the spirit of openness and accountability and repair that actions go forward in.
Speaker 7:But the way that those claims are articulated has always given me a lot of pause, because it's within a Christian theological framework and there is room given to the very real fact that indigenous communities know their lands and what constitutes well-being best and need decision-making authority. And yet there's still a narrowing of focus on indigenous traditions and their relationship with God, like the language of God, the creator, in the singular Christian form is still used. So my worry is the Catholic Church once again using the language of enculturation and openness but replicating the same dangers, this time in an ecological moment. And so the last thing I'll say is that the work of Phil and Sandy and so many others has been really powerful to me as a way to recognize the depth of the doctrine of discovery and how that shows up in La Ratossie, that these histories have not been sufficiently recognized, you know, despite many movements by indigenous peoples worldwide to have them recognized. And when, somewhat recently, the Catholic Church said oh right, let us say a few words about the doctrine of discovery. It was simply to distance itself from it, which is not ownership or accountability or repair.
Speaker 7:And so that's part of why I'm here is to because I find myself curiously emplaced in this Jesuit context to try to learn what best practices would look like, what little I can do in the positionality that I have as a professor and a writer and a conversation partner and learner, and to try to honor the fact that learning and healing do not get to be easily achieved with the swipe of a pen, of someone powerful, no matter how people. His title. That's me. So thanks for having us. There were other things that I had very thoroughly thought out to say, but you know, life is long and so are conversations. So thanks, kim. Would you like to? Or Sandy or Chip?
Speaker 6:what do you think? That's fine, I'm Kim. I Kim Carpore. I come from the Bay Area right now.
Speaker 6:So I was born and raised in Michigan and I find that my heart and my soul and my roots are very much in Michigan and so when I came in here and I saw the map that included the lower peninsula of Michigan, which is where I'm from, I always say, where are you on the map? I'm right here. And so I was born and raised in Port Huron, on Lake Huron, so where Lake Huron kind of gets really skinny and then it gets a little bit wider, and so that very skinny part there was a bridge and so I grew up it was about a five minute drive and I would just. My favorite place to be was to look at the Blue Water Bridge and the water was so blue and it was so strange to me that I could see Canada. It didn't make any sense to me. How can I live in America and be an American citizen and then look and see Canada and the air we breathe is obviously the same and the water that we touch is the same is obviously the same and the water that we touch is the same, but yet we live in such different laws, right, like Oren talks about law and the law of Mother Earth. And so I guess from a young age I thought about well, who gets to choose laws and why are they the established norms that we exist by? And it seems very top-down like somebody decided this and then we all, as people of the earth, just this is how we relate to each other and this is how we relate to the land, and those are different based upon what someone chooses. So I think that's where I came from and that's how I started thinking about the differences between the laws of man and the laws of humans versus the laws of nature.
Speaker 6:And so I got a degree in psychology at the University of Michigan, because I was obsessed thinking about what makes people tick, why do people behave in the way they do? I was so curious about what caused wars and why are these people nice to each other, cause wars and why are these people nice to each other. And so then after that, I ended up getting a job. My first job after college was a wilderness therapy program. So I went from university to then living close to nature where we backpacked. We did two weeks on, two weeks in the wilderness and two weeks off, doing whatever I wanted, and I didn't have a home on my off time. And so I felt that living in that rhythm really deconstructed what I would consider the laws of humans or the laws of land, because I didn't look at my watch right, like father time and mother earth, which seemed so the way these dualistic laws, which were very normalized in society or civilization, were deconstructed when I just lived and taught in the wilderness and what we did was okay, we got to eat, we got to make sure that okay, is everybody, okay, are we hiking to the next place? Right? And so I think my body started to feel into those rhythms, right? So the winter, the days were short, and so we went to bed at 4 pm and then we got up at 6 am and when your body, when my body, was attuned to those rhythms, I could no longer go back to the structures of humans or man, or society, or university in the same way, and so now I feel like, okay, so why would you get a PhD? I you know.
Speaker 6:Back to Oren, your question what is your mission? That really struck me at my core, especially because the connotations of the word mission are very historically traumatic for, for indigenous peoples, right, the missions of Jesuits and Catholics, and forcing everybody to live in this human realm, right? Um. So I was like, oh, I don't want to talk. What is your mission? I didn't come here. I even, I think someone called me an expert. I'm like, I don't feel like an expert. I'm not an expert in anything but my mission. I think last night I thought, going back to what was I talking about before?
Speaker 7:Why get a PhD?
Speaker 6:Oh yeah, thank you. Yeah, why get a PhD? I think a lot about, and I can never remember who quoted this Adrienne Rich or Audre Lorde? But she says this is the colonizer's language. Yet I need it to talk to you. And so I thought, okay, if I can kind of force myself back into that the laws of man then maybe I can communicate to people that there's another way. And so I'm here. I never really know what that looks like, but I think that's my mission. And so, to be a little bit more specific in terms of why am I here at the Scano Center, I'm really interested in thinking about building coalitions of mutual support. I don't know what that looks like, but once again, with this leading, with this idea of protecting Mother Earth, and to kind of go back to what you said or in yeah, of course I don't have anything to teach you. That's ridiculous. I didn't want to get out of my seat because I don't even feel like.
Speaker 1:I want to be up here speaking.
Speaker 6:I know the power of words. I'm not here to teach anything. I feel like I want to be up here speaking. I know the power of words. I'm not here to teach anything, but I do want to use my mind and my labor and my body and my services. I don't like the word body in the connotations of the feminists, like using your body for something, but I want to use what I have to offer this world to do good work right. And I think that's a big question what does it mean to do good work?
Speaker 6:Coming from a settler, colonial perspective, I want to learn. I want to stay in my lane, but I also want to know what can I do from my positionality to bring this story to bring to develop material relationships, something right? What can that look like for the future? So I think I had planned to talk about the feminist movement and how it relates to the doctrine of Christian discovery. But these are the words that I have for now and I really thanks for listening and I really do. I want to honor Sally Roche Wagner. That was very I was very shocked to hear that this morning, but I want to honor her, her life and her legacy as well. Yeah, Thank you.
Speaker 4:I would like to add that these two men here, adok, over here, raise your hand, adok, sitting there, and Jake, these are iron workers. They put up your buildings in those big cities. 80 stories, 90 stories. These guys right here, they put up your buildings in those big cities, thank you. Eighty stories, ninety stories. It was these guys right here and around the bridges, and all of that. A lot of our men did that job, started with the Mohawks. You know the bridge up there and there was good money in it, so they went. So they can tell you a whole lot of stories here.
Speaker 4:And I spent some years in New York myself, on Madison Avenue. I worked in advertising. So you ain't going to tell me anything about this. We have a broad perspective here, and I came back here and I'm working with the nation and I got to be a teacher, a professor, at the University of Buffalo for 37 years too as well. So we've been around. There's a broad perspective here and appreciate the fact that you're traveling and learning. This is all you learn, you know, absorb that and travel, and not much known about Native people here. This lake right here. You're on this lake here. That's the first place of democracy here. So our first meeting was held, peacemaker, nobody knows for sure how many years ago, but a long time ago, way before our white brothers came across the water. Very old, our white brothers came across the water very old. But right here on this lake started the Haudenosaunee. So that was the. That was the birthplace of democracy as we know it today. Pretty much I had to learn that I didn't know much, you know, I was just a kid running around the woods, onondaga, hunting, fishing, not for fun, for survival.
Speaker 4:Onondaga Nation is the number—or the consul fire for the Six Nations. We have the big meetings we have here at Onondaga, at the and half of our people in Canada as well, way back in Montreal, you know, and Ontario, and we have people all the way to Oklahoma, and so we have a broad perspective and a broad part of the early history of travel and moving. I'll come way over there, you know All of that is a story. But here in Onondaga, this is the story of the great peace and the great peacemaker and this lake you're right on it. You're right where it started, right here, right on this lake, here and it's interesting enough that that's the most polluted pot of water in the country right here, also Interesting. It's very sacred and we had the—fortunate to have a lot of good leaders and teachers in our family and and our nation. And Adark's mother was one of our great leaders and she made an odd statement one time, an offhand remark here, about this. She says what they call Onondaga Lake here. She says that wasn't our name for it. She says Our name for it means where the leaves touch the water. That's the name of that lake. But our brothers, white brothers, came here. They called it Onondaga because that's where we are and we've been here a long time.
Speaker 4:But you will find, you know, if you go back and you start looking in the history and start looking at the, there are history books with all the old names, with the Indian names on it Very interesting, because the names are not. The names are descriptive, they just tell what it is and what it's doing. Because the names are not. The names are descriptive, they just tell what it is and what it's doing. There's a lot of it in your history. You have it in your books but you've got to go dig it out.
Speaker 4:I didn't know that because when I became well, your system is an amazing system I had to quit school in the seventh grade, you know, first because I didn't like the teachers, they didn't like me either, and we had come from the reservation school in the sixth grade and then we came down to the school in downtown sort of, and that was a lot of trouble and I had to go hunting anyway for the family. I couldn't be going to school every day, I had to hunt for a living. Actually, and you're talking about 1930, 35, 37, 40. Ammunition was hard to come by because there was a war going on, very difficult, very difficult. So if you had three shells in your pocket, you better come back with three something because you couldn't afford to miss. So if you had three shells in your pocket, you better come back with three something because you couldn't afford to miss A very different time. So I grew up doing that.
Speaker 4:The war years, and this country and our people always adapt to everything. You know, as best as we can we keep our system, keep it strong, hard still. We're probably the last of the traditional leadership. Still most of them, 99% of the Indian nations, are under the Bureau of Indian Affairs or, in Canada, the Department of Indian Affairs. That's where they get their money, that's where their orders come from here at Larnedaga. No, this is the chief's here. He spent a long time in the chief's council, so we're probably the last traditional government still in charge of land right here. And then, of course, when you come into the Onondaga territory and you should go down and get lunch at our—we have a restaurant down there called Fire Keepers in Skippin. Everybody goes there. Anyway, I have to travel on to our next event today so I can't stay around too much longer, but I appreciate your visit and your mission. You know to learn it's important. Very hard to learn anything about Native people because they don't teach about us.
Speaker 4:If you look and you try to find the history of the Onondagas, we're still tipping over wagon trains and we're still cutting down wires and so forth, and that's a long history about that. Why? And the first boarding schools? They weren't boarding schools. They weren't boarding schools. They were institutions, mind-changing institutions that took our children. Institutions, mind changing institutions, took our children. And if you look at the pictures of those one very famous school here in Pennsylvania of all those kids sitting there, all in their hair is cut and they're all in uniform and there must be 300 of them sitting there and look carefully at every one of them and not one of them is smiling Not one, you know. And kids are always laughing. Kids are always Not one smile. You know that was captives. They were captured, they were taken from their families and some never got back. So those schools, so-called schools were brainwashing institutions. And there were quite a few of them, a lot in Canada, a lot in the US.
Speaker 4:So that part of history you won't find in your history book and it's not taught. But we know it very well because we're the recipients of it and we're also the survivors. So I do appreciate the fact that you're traveling and you're coming to hear these stories very directly. You're not going to get a better direct story than what's sitting right here, because we've been fighting this thing for a long time. We were the first ones who took a group over to Switzerland, got out of the box in 1977. We got out of the box and we took our argument to the international world. Yeah, it's been that way ever since.
Speaker 4:In 1923 there was a chief, a Cayuga chief, canada side, and he took the argument over to Switzerland and he tried to get into the League of Nations and they wouldn't allow him to speak there because he was speaking against Canada in 1923. His name was Descahe. That's a chief's title, a Cayuga chief, and we have a chief today with that title because we passed these titles down and Descahe is still around. But at that time that was the sky. And when we went to Geneva in 77, I was one of the people who put that together and we got over there with no money, but we got there and we were headed for the.
Speaker 4:You know, it was not the League of Nations now, it was different, the United Nations, and we were going to get a voice there and we didn't carry a US passport. We made our own passport. We made our own passport. That's what we traveled on in 1977, our own passport Because you have to maintain your integrity and documents they call treaties. So you can't be an American citizen and have a treaty with yourself. So we maintain our integrity here as Anadarka Nation, the Haudenosaunee, independent, sovereign, and we still travel on our own passports. And not easy, it's not easy. There's a lot of passport stories that are amazing, but anyway we do. We try hard, you know, and it's coming around now, people coming back, but suddenly here you are talking to us and for a long, long time we were kind of over there.
Speaker 4:So survival time for humanity is what it is and that's very real and it's here right now. And you think, if you look at the weather, watch the weather around the United States and then watch how the heat's moving and make note of that, that and notice next year is going to be much hotter. It's a compound effect. It's on its way. We've affected it. It's not going to get better because We've got two major wars going on right now. When I should be sitting down talking about the future of humanity, we've got two big wars going on.
Speaker 4:So leadership is not there. It's got to be local, it's got to be like yourself. You've got to do the leading, you've got to speak up. The people have got to speak up. We're pushing our existence as a species. We're a lot closer than people think and they're not watching that. They're involved in politics and they should be really talking about survival as a species.
Speaker 4:And that's this great tree of peace there. That's it right. The only solution to all this is peace, and that's not the absence of war. I mean real peace, because when the peacemaker brought our people together and he put that tree, he says he uprooted the tree. He said throw your weapons of war in there, so the waters will take them away. So I meant really put your weapons down. That's a long time ago the good instructions, and it's not over, but we're pushing. We're really pushing people out of their way.
Speaker 4:But you're not going to be able to ignore the heat next year. No matter what, no matter what your politics are, it's going to get hot and it's going to get hot faster. So it's a common cause. We're human beings, you know. We're not black, white, red or green. We're human beings. We're not black, white, red or green. We're human beings. We're relatives and, as I always say, we can exchange blood and you can't get closer than that. I don't care what color you are. If you're dying there, you're not going to ask what kind of blood you're getting in a transfusion. That's common. So we have to get back to that understanding. Ask what kind of blood you're getting in a transfusion, that's common. So we have to get back to that understanding of family, human family, and then the foundation of that family is peace. That's principle, basic, down to earth, ground principle. So I appreciate your interest in your presence here. I hope we can have added something to the discussion that's going on and I have to go to the next one, so I've got to leave right now.
Speaker 1:So I thank you for your presence do you need help catching up on today's topic or do you want to learn more about the resources mentioned? If so, please check our website at podcastdoctrineofdiscoveryorg for more information and, if you like this episode, review it on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts at podcastdoctrineofdiscoveryorg for more information and, if you like this episode, review it on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 9:And now back to the conversation. Okay, hello, Thank you everyone. My name is Chip Callahan.
Speaker 9:I teach in religious studies at Gonzaga University in St Ann Washington, a long way away, and I first got to Gonzaga in about 2018, I guess, is when I started there. I had come there from the University of Missouri, where Phil also taught well before I got there, and I'm trying to think how I can make this make sense. So there's a lot of reasons why I went up to Gonzaga, but I didn't go there initially to teach at Gonzaga. I went to Spokane for another reason and ended up being hired because they needed someone to teach a Native American religions class, and that's not really what I do and I have issues with the whole language of Native American religions. But I had taken courses with a Mescalero Apache woman named Ines Talamantes at University of California, santa Barbara, and she had, you know, opened my eyes to different ways of doing class. Right, she would take us for walks on the beach I mean, it was Santa Barbara and say this is your learning and I thought, oh, wow, okay.
Speaker 9:And then. So, therefore, I had also been sort of teaching some Native American religion courses at University of Missouri, which was an interesting department of religious studies because from its founding they insisted on teaching Asian religions, western religions and indigenous religions. They say these all three are foundational to thinking about religion, and rather than calling it religion, I always talk about thinking about religion. What does that even mean, right? So, anyway, I end up up there in Spokane and there's someone there who knows that I can teach this class, so they hire me to teach this class.
Speaker 9:One of the first things I say the class, but it was four sections of the class, so it was four classes of that. And one of the first things I did was I realized Gonzaga has a, an office of tribal relations, and so I and and they that operates out of a house that they call the native house. That is where you, where Native American students, hang out. And I thought, well, if I'm going to be teaching this material, as a white guy, I need to at least go check in and say hello.
Speaker 9:And I was told that I was the first person from the department to have come over there and said hello and I thought this is not. This is strange, but I'm going gonna try to work on cultivating this relationship. Let me also say that when I was in Missouri, missouri has no currently has no federally recognized tribes in the state, which is not to say there were no native people there, but, yeah, those tribes have been moved away, so to be also to be in eastern Washington, where there are I can't even think offhand right now, but many reservations within an hour's drive of Spokane.
Speaker 9:There's just a very different kind of sense of place and sense of relationship between native people and settlers, relationship between Native people and settlers. So these things sort of started to come together and I thought you can't. You know, I'm teaching Native American religions or whatever that is in a place that is. A lot of my students were Spokane, colville, Coeur d'Alene, kootenai, all these different tribes around that area, and I'm teaching this in a.
Speaker 9:Jesuit school and I had never taught it at a Jesuit school. I'm not Catholic and in teaching this history I'm thinking this is kind of a really explosive combination here. Potentially, but nobody sort of it didn't click for that so. I start talking to Wendy Thompson a whole lot. She's the director of the Office of Tribal Relations. I have since come to find out, just like yesterday maybe I was looking up how many Jesuit schools have offices of tribal relations and, at least according to Google AI, it just kept coming back with Gonzaga.
Speaker 4:So I don't think others do I've never heard of it.
Speaker 9:So I mean the whole way I was then picturing. So Jesuit schools, jesuit universities, operate under this idea of what they call Ignatian pedagogy, a sort of way of teaching that was created by Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, and it emphasizes sort of starting in place, where you are and where the students are, and having the material relate to the students, having the students reflect on the material and think how does this pertain to me? You're not just learning stuff, you're trying to think about, reflect on what does this have to do with me? And so I thought, well, to teach in a pedagogical, in a nation Jesuit pedagogical manner at a Jesuit school in this place. We need to think about how did this institution come to be in this place? And that means getting to really dig into this idea that the whole question of settler colonialism is one carried out by Jesuits, among other people.
Speaker 9:And so we at that institution are part of that history. If you go to school at a Jesuit school, you can't just say that's something that happened somewhere else, to someone else by someone else. You're part of this institution. The fact that you found an education in this place, at this school, means you're part of that history. So we need to reflect on that. So that's one piece of something I want to think about.
Speaker 9:Another is this, so I start talking to Wendy Thompson, the director of the Office of Tribal Relations, a whole lot about she's thinking through what is that? What is that title? What is the Office of Tribal Relations? What are we supposed to be doing? And she thought there's sort of two directions that goes. One is how does this university relate to these tribal communities? What can we do for you? What do you want from us? And the other is making helping students, native students, feel at home right, feel like they are not alienated at the university. And she said, she said often. She said and I'm not sure in some days why we're doing that, but that's just something we want to do. And so we started talking a lot about how the problem, so to speak, is not so much and this is coming back to these issues of environments and ecology and stuff I'll come to that in just a second but part of the problem with all of this in recognizing indigenous history, something Oren was saying.
Speaker 9:nobody knows about Haudenosaunee, nobody knows about Onondaga in this history. Over the years teaching this stuff at Gonzaga, it just comes home to me every semester nobody knows any of this. Even the students who think they know something about this know nothing about this Because Americans, non-native Americans, don't know anything about this because we don't teach it. And those who think they know something about it know all kinds of romanticized, strange ideas, especially when they're in a class called Native American religions and they think all kinds of crazy stuff and so I'm going to put that story aside for just a sec.
Speaker 9:Also, at Gonzaga, we have something called the Institute on Climate Water and the Environment, which started in 2018, I think it's a really well-funded institute that studies those things the climate and water and the environment and does a lot of stuff locally for working on that. So, as students and community members and faculty working on projects like I remember a recent one was, they measured the temperature in very different places around Spokane, the city of Spokane, and maybe not surprisingly found that places that don't have a lot of trees in their urban spaces are a lot hotter than the places where you know people live that have lawns and trees and stuff like that. And so correlating on a map you know income levels and poverty with heat indexes and greenery and the fact that you fact that, why are there so many poorer people getting hotter and sicker in the summers, etc. And then trying to do something about that Planting more trees, having air conditioners and fans Really good, practical stuff. But maybe I can connect this by saying just this past year I had a student in a class who was an environmental studies major, who we read something. Apparently I learned this after the fact, but we read something in class about from a. I'm not sure who wrote it, but a native scholar wrote something about sustainability and relations between human and other than human beings in a place that he said made him understand sustainability much deeper and in a different way than he had. And I thought this is an environmental studies major who does stuff with the Climate Institute and somehow he wasn't making the connections that this one thing that he read made everything click and I started to think all of these have something to do with each other.
Speaker 9:The Jesuit school in Spokane, the Jesuits to think about. What are the Jesuits doing in Spokane we have to think about. We had Phil and Sandy out last fall to talk about the doctrine of Christian discovery. You need to understand the doctrine of discovery to think about, to understand why were all these Christians coming to this place in the first place and, as they were coming, also trying to undermine existing ways of knowing and relating to the land and replace that with ways of knowing and relating to land and to people. That has caused the climate crisis that we have today. And now you have back to what Christie was saying, the Pope, the former Pope writing about recovering indigenous knowledge to help save the earth and the climate. This is coming from the same institution that undermined all that right.
Speaker 9:And so, to bring all this back to speaking to the Office of Tribal Relations, we were thinking about how do we pull this stuff together. These are one story, the doctrine of Christian discovery the Jesuits in this place. The displacement of native people and the climate change are all kind of one related story and people are wanting to somehow they see that it's one story and they're saying let's like the Pope was saying, let's care for the environment and let's learn from indigenous knowledge, but the problem is that nobody knows anything.
Speaker 9:No, non-Native people know these stories, but the problem is that nobody knows anything. No, non-native people know these stories. So, even at a place like Gonzaga that has tribal communities all around it, has a lot of native students at the school, has an office of tribal relations and has a mission statement all about social and environmental justice and has a climate justice center, if nowhere else on earth, that place should be a place that can take as its mission to try to begin to undo some of this. As a non-native professor myself, I'm sitting here thinking I'm not the one to propose the solutions here, right, but what we ended up talking about a lot is that there's sort of two sides to this issue. One is how does this history relate to Native communities and what Native communities want out of this history, or to reconcile with, or whatever, this history? But then the other side of it is that the non-Native people, who all have this white guilt and want to solve these problems, right, they all say, oh, we need to do something, we need to do something, but they can't do something meaningful until they step back and learn this history.
Speaker 9:So I think one thing I mean so an issue for me and for my and the students I teach that keep coming up is they all want to do something and they all see these interconnections, but they also don't know what they're talking about. And the question then is always what can we do? What as white people? What's our role? What can we do? And they all want to like run off and help people.
Speaker 9:But I think that one thing that we want to really begin to recognize and emphasize as we start to work through these issues is that white people need to educate white people about this history, not just what happened, not just give them a book of historical facts and not just give them a book of historical facts, but really through. I mean, one thing that I think religious studies and theology for you guys maybe allows us to do is to approach that history through not just a history of economics or a history of politics or a history of social development, but through the lens of how that whole process of colonization based on the lens of how that whole process of colonization based on the doctrine of discovery is also a process of trying to replace a way of being in the world and understanding the world through certain kinds of relations with another one.
Speaker 9:And it's not just that we can just do what we're doing and then say, oh, but we can take these ideas from over there. But to recognize the wholeness of these different and I say different.
Speaker 9:I don't just want to make it sound like a binary, because obviously the other thing that has to happen to understand this is that colonization is and was a process that is shared across the landscape of the Americas and yet it always happened in particular ways, in particular places. So as we, as Jesuits, recognize our well, we're not Jesuits as we who are employed by Jesuit institutions right and therefore have some kind of relationship.
Speaker 9:We're paid, at the very least, by Jesuits. If we are going to try to think about the doctrine of discovery and legato si, and what does it mean to care for the earth and to somehow say that this has some kind of relationship to indigenous ways of knowing? I think each of these individual Jesuit institutions needs to figure out their own history and their own relationship to their place, to how they got to that place and to their way of displacing native peoples, and then figure that out for themselves.
Speaker 9:And then we all need to come together and so there's this on the one hand, this big picture of colonization at Jesuit institutions, and also there are these specific histories, and then we all need to make that a part of how we're teaching our students. I mean that this is not just something that happened, but you are part of this history, not in the abstract, but you're getting a degree from a place that exists in this place because of this history, and we're teaching you in a way that has been used to displace other ways of knowing, and so how can we begin to? One thing that they talk about at Jesuit institutions is how you is what they call formation, how you form students. Right, but how can part of your Jesuit formation, your formation of your identity, include the fact that you are not of this place originally and there are people that are of this place originally and finding ways to make that a recognized piece of our understanding of who we are and where we are? So that's a long way around, maybe.
Speaker 9:Just to say, when we're talking about these, issues I think that part of it needs to be the recognition that Jesuit institutions have a particular responsibility to teach this history in ways that connect them to the place and the original peoples of the place and be a part of that, not just tell it as like that's nice, but we're part of the displacement, definitely. And how do we replace that?
Speaker 8:And that's your identity, being displaced. Yeah. And yeah, it's a real conundrum. It is Because you're in the institution that has severed you from this special relationship to the earth. The full intention was to come and sever indigenous people from their identity with the earth, and so how does an institution heal when the institution is the problem? Phil and I talk about that all the time. How can you find the solution there?
Speaker 1:Jake in the.
Speaker 8:Thanksgiving address is talking about the birds. We're not just listening to the birds singing. We're listening to the birds because they have something to tell us. That's the missing link, because in educational institutions you're taught to know and you get your degree and you're the expert and you're supposed to be conveying all this on other people. But a Haudenosaunee identity is built in this relationship which I was trying to show in the tour. You know, sky Woman Falls. It's the natural beings that save her and place her upon turtles' back and she would never have existed had they not reached out to save her life. And then, establishing the clan systems, jigong, as I say, takes the women to the forest and, following the peacemaker's instructions, they don't just say, oh, I think I'll be, you know, a deer clan. No, he said, you will follow instructions and specific beings will present themselves to you. So where in you know the education, the colonial education, are we supposed to release, knowing everything he's back?
Speaker 3:I don't see it.
Speaker 4:Oh.
Speaker 3:I don't think he brought it in.
Speaker 8:So how are we supposed to release this hold of? Being an expert and learn and listen. And that's going to be really hard to do in a Christian institution.
Speaker 9:And one thing we found in Gonzaga is when everybody has ideas about what we can do for the tribes.
Speaker 8:How about yourselves?
Speaker 9:you know Exactly and when you ask at least where I am and I think it's going to be different in different places, but where I am, if you, apparently, because I haven't asked, but Wendy talks to the tribes all the time. What do they want? And what they want is a place that has knowledge, like Gonzaga. They would like it to turn attention to things like language revitalization. Absolutely.
Speaker 6:And food sovereignty Right.
Speaker 9:And so to turn.
Speaker 8:What you can do, it's to empower these traditional practices among native communities, because another thing that Jesuits and colonists did was supplant this hierarchical structure so that the people running these Indian nations all over the country are under this guise of a hierarchy government which is not indigenous to any of these territories. So a lot of the Native people there are also lost because they're not practicing their traditions. That's why it's so powerful here at Onondaga, because they didn't go through that. They had churches on their territories, they had that iron fist silencing them, but they were able to sustain their traditions. I don't know how they did it, but they did it. And these people exist all over the country, but they have no voice like Biana and Daga do. I've said enough. You can talk, jake. I'll go pour myself more coffee.
Speaker 3:We'll see where we know. Earlier today we heard of putting the pen to the paper. You said so. When you talk about the institutions that are teaching, they're reading somebody else's pen to the paper and what was on their mind, and so you've got to remember. They have to jot down what their superiors are expecting them to write and reasoning. What they're doing is correct, they're doing is correct.
Speaker 3:So their literature that all these scholars are learning today, like the Jesuit missions, you follow that back to the doctrine of discovery, and somewhere's in there there's some honest writers that told how it is and what they saw. Those ones are mostly unpublished, just like the Sullivan Clinton campaign of 1779, the journals of the soldiers, the militia. Only a certain few were chosen to be published, and that's the ones that degrade us as a people. And so the ones that weren't were usually burned, and in our oral teachings, those nice guys that were in it, they didn't want to be in that militia. Now, my gram she was born in 1880s and I remember her very well. Of course the ADOC remembers gram Edith and she told what her grandmother told in exactly the spot that we hid. So if you can imagine what's coming up in the next couple weeks is this Fourth of July celebration and if you're sitting anywhere in the country, you're going to hear boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all as boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Speaker 3:As we watched our villages get burned out and our crops. They had a mission, scorched Earth Campaign and some of the stories that weren't published, that were told were of women holding their babies and being stripped from their arms and whipped against a tree by their baby's ankles and thrown at the mother's feet to say this is what you're going to live with if you stay. So our advice to you is to leave, and a lot of our people left. The other part about it was that Bible to accept that Bible so that these people will accept you. Otherwise, you're going to be living in pain like that baby, living in pain like that baby.
Speaker 3:When you talk about the iron fist, you hear about the iron fist. These stories go untold because our people are in pain to hear it again. And we can't share that with the non-natives because we'll get more of that pain from them. And so when you hear that term, the truth hurts. It certainly does, it certainly does. And so when you talk about staying in your own lane, you mention that we talked about staying in your own lane. You mention that we talked about that in 1613.
Speaker 3:We got a stay in your own lane treaty with you guys.
Speaker 3:There's your lane, Stay in it. There's our lane. It represents the canoe and the vessel, the boat and your religion. Your way, your ceremonies, your laws stay in your vessel. Ours will stay in ours. And we agree to travel the river of life side by each. Not to enforce ours onto anyone. You're not to enforce yours onto us.
Speaker 3:Violations there's a lot of violations that occur. There's a lot of violations like that one out there. We got treaties afterwards with the colonizers and there's a lot of misinterpreted writings, Because you also got to remember that there's a barrier of language understandings. The interpreters were Christians, the interpreters. They were told at the very beginning that the way to get to the indigenous people's lands is through their language, and I was told that linguist was developed here in America, in Massachusetts, for that very purpose. You've got to understand what they talk about in order to take their land, At the same time passing a law that Massachusetts claimed all the way over to the west coast it was theirs. I don't know if they ever rescinded that law. That law was passed in a pub Of course it was yeah, right.
Speaker 3:And so when you look at the destruction, you know you guys are scholars, academics, and you understand his story. I had a hard time in school myself when Oren mentioned that he went to 7th grade. I got him. I went to 8th grade, I got him by a year. And I didn't get along with my teachers either, especially social studies, because I'd go home to do my homework. So they didn't hold me back again and I'd ask my uncle and my mom why are you guys teaching us this and they're teaching us this and they're not the same? And uncle said well, my ma said first she said break that word in half. That's his story. That's not necessarily how it happened, but that's his story. And if you want to pass in his class then you got to understand his story, but if you want to survive as Onondaga then you better listen to his. And she pointed at her brother, my uncle. So I closed that book and I started talking to uncle and I was a little bit different than other people, my age, my friends, my brothers.
Speaker 3:I got eight brothers and three sisters and three that were taken in, adopted. It wasn't adoption, but they always slept with us and ate with us, did chores with us, so I guess you can call it an adoption. One of them was a white guy, billy Donathan. You remember him? Yeah, billy, my ma took him in. He was orphaned and he lived up on Onondaga Hill and there's a dirt road that used to go to Onondaga Hill that I lived on and my father friended him and so he stayed with us. He was my older brother's age. He stayed and hung out with us until dark and walking back. He stayed hung out with us until dark and walking back up the hill about a three-mile walk. And one day this taxi driver that used to be down in the nation, paul Beckman it was dark, so they hired him to take that boy home and he got home and when he was there the house was empty and there was a box with his stuff in it and a note that said you like the Indians so much. Go live with them. So he did. He lived with us till he died. I mean, he went on his own once he became an adult.
Speaker 3:But we took him in and under those teachings are is he must have followed the white roots of peace to get to us, and the white roots of peace is in the great law. When the great tree of peace was planted, as you heard Oren mention that, the tree was uprooted and all the weapons of war were buried and to be washed off by the waters under the ground so that our next generations don't see these weapons of war. They're not just knives and tomahawks and bows and arrows. Weapons of war, it's dark thinking, sharp words. That's what starts wars. Right A gun don't start a war. It's those dark emotions that trigger you to get somebody else mad or upset. And so those are all buried too. And on top of it the root, the tree, is placed back over that uprooted hole where all the weapons of war are buried and the white roots are expanded in all directions. Anybody can follow them roots to seek shelter under the laws of the great law of peace. And so that's what my elders thought this little white boy was doing, because we heard that before anybody that was sometimes called captive Settlers children are kidnapped in the woods and raised as Indians.
Speaker 3:Hardly any of them wanted to go back. They never wanted to go back to their own people, they wanted to stay. The Louisiana Purchase is a big example of that. The French did the same thing. The French was in control of that right According to their laws, their man-made up laws. When it came time for the French to fight for that, their own people said, no, we're not, but these are good people, and they created their own culture down there. And since they didn't have no support of the Frenchmen on the lands, then they had to sell it, which wasn't even their right to sell, but they did anyways. And so when you talk about the great love, peace, it connects to every single thing in life.
Speaker 1:It connects to all things in life, even war.
Speaker 3:It talks about wars. It talks about sharp words. The sharp words that hurt feelings, that cause wars, are buried, so future generations don't have to see that buried. So future generations don't have to see that. And so when the missionaries start coming into our area, this is what we remember. But it was our kids. It was a young, I don't know how many winters old. He was 11 winters maybe. I think we don't count the years, we count the winters. How old are you? Even to ask you how old you are, don't you still say how many winters have you seen? And sometimes you tell Sometimes we might have had no snow that winter. So you're still 39. Everybody's 39.
Speaker 3:There was a pause and this guy was in that mission, st Marie Le Moynes, wherever it was, not far from here, just up, less than thousand yards away, and he heard something under his foot and he went and told his people that that floor sounds different under that carpet or that rug they had, sleeping pad or sleeping rug they had. And so they. He was instructed to go find out what made it sound different. Because they were skeptical of these mission missionaries, because the first thing they said was they got paper to your land. Right, they had a document saying this is all ours now, but we'll work with you Telling us that. Well, anyways, they found weapons under there, guns and rum. Rum or whiskey, one or the other, I don't know. There was a taste of who we did trade with by. Either it was with the French for the rum or the English for the taste. So it became a war between them on supplying us the drink we preferred after we got a taste of it. This is what we heard from our oral teachings, and we're told that either one of them are no good and it burns your guts, and they must have meant your liver because it causes cirrhosis. So our people knew that way back then that they call it fire water. It burns your insides out.
Speaker 3:And so, anyways, as far as the missionaries go and what you were talking about and how to teach that I'm going and what you were talking about and how to teach that you can't really instruct someone to say, read this book, this book, this book, all those books, and you become a teacher yourself. You have to teach by example and in the case of the Christians, it would be returning the land without question to who it belongs to. Then you'll get your answers to a better environment. Return the land immediately, without question. No, you have to become a priest in order to accept this land or any of that kind of stuff. Because that's what they're saying. The higher-ups got more land and got more control of it.
Speaker 3:We'll turn it all back over, right to the people, right to the people of the land, starting right here. Pull the strings, write paper what do you call that? Pen to the paper To initiate the United States laws to automatically turn over land back to the indigenous peoples, because it was the Christians who helped formate the laws, even to this day, to do just the damage that we're talking about. And so if you want to start healing, you start with where it started, taking the land. So give it back. Make the laws happen to give it back, get the money available to pass the laws to get it back. Then you're going to see some healing start taking effect, just like on the Klamath River and what the salmon are doing and what the bears are doing and the berries and all that, everything we just talked about.
Speaker 3:Right, environmental justice is coming to show its face by returning that.
Speaker 3:So when you look at the body of water and you feel the presence of the water just for a moment, feel that You're surrounded in sacred water.
Speaker 3:You don't know the outside world yet, you haven't even taken a breath yet, but you can feel the water and the water breaks and you take your breath. In itself is a sacred time, sacredness of it. And so when you talk about the sacredness of water and then you talk about constructing a dam, that's like taking the indigenous people out of their house and putting them on a reservation in the water, in a lake or a reservoir. You're damming up, you're stopping natural flow. You're stopping it, you're not killing it. We're still here. The waters are still going over that dam. They're trying to have control of all natural life, including indigenous people. So if you want to do the right thing, then put your pen to the paper and make a law to give this land right back to the indigenous peoples all across the country and start the healing process right there for the environment, and then keep all your religions and all your fancy dancing and all your whiskey and rum in your boat Right and sail away.
Speaker 8:There's more to the story, that's great, that's a good place to end. I think, yeah, I think so. Perfect wrap-up.
Speaker 1:The producers of this podcast were Adam T Brett and Jordan Lawn Cologne. Our intro and outro is social dancing music by Oris Edwards and Regis Cook. This podcast is funded in collaboration with the Henry Luce Foundation, Syracuse University and Hendrix Chapel and the Indigenous Values Initiative. If you like this episode, please check out our website and make sure to subscribe.
